It’s officially election season, 2024. Well, maybe closer to Labor Day is the official date. However, as many of you reading this know, it never really ends here in Iowa – with our First in the Nation Caucuses. (I’m sure likeme you’re relieved to see laundry soap and agricultural chemical ads return every November, instead of the constant bombardment of political ads.)
Almost three years ago, IFC-PAC launched our digital campaign to ensure victory for the long, hard-fought struggle to ensure passage of the Freedom Amendment. With your help, we achieved a remarkable 65.17% victory and captured an estimated 20% of Democrats and 60% of Independents who voted “yes” on State Ballot Measure Number 1. This successful campaign earned more votes than any other statewide race.
Engaging Voters
Why am I bringing that up now you might ask? That digital campaign allowed IFC to engage with over one million Iowans of voting age. In the campaign, IFC-PAC was able to highlight and publicly thank the elected Representatives and Senators at both the State and Federal levels, Statewide office holders (and candidates), and County elected officials who supported the Freedom Amendment.
IFC-PAC worked hard to become the “go-to” expert on all things Second Amendment here in Iowa. We need to repeat that effort again this summer and into Election Day on November 5th.
Because of the foundation you helped IFC build in 2021-2022, this yearthat job is easier. However, we still need to do it. In order to highlight 2A supporters, IFC-PAC needs to fund our digital campaign again this Summer and Fall. Unlike 2021-2022, the need is not for hundreds of thousands of dollars,but instead just a fraction of that.
You all know how hostile Biden and his ‘string-pullers behind the scenes’ are toward your individual rights, and particularly the 2nd Amendment. Let’s stop them here in Iowa from making any gains against your freedom.
That’s why I’m asking you today to go to IFC-PAC and donate what you can. Even just a small recurring donation is a huge help. Your local elected Representatives will tell you that they appreciate IFC-PAC’s highlighting them as supporters, as opposed to the small amount of dollars we could donate to each of their campaigns directly.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all Iowan’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
FBI: don’t believe your lying eyes! Well, it would figure that the once-revered Federal Bureau of Investigation as the ‘best of the best’ in America has now totally succumbed to the Obama-Biden politicization of Federal Law Enforcement and our DOJ. The FBI is cooking the books when it comes to crime data in the United States, and it was another federal agency that ratted them out!
The FBI issues its Uniform Crime reports, butit fails to highlight that major cities like New York,Los Angeles, and others, don’t even report their crime data to the FBI. Also, many other cities including Baltimore and Chicago underreport theirs. Meanwhile, in its annual National Crime Victimization Survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows crime skyrocketing!
Noted economist and author Dr. John Lott just published an article about this very subject, it’s worth a full read. I’ll highlight just a few paragraphs here:
“I have pointed out before that since 2020, the FBI’s number of reported crimes and the NCVS’s number of total crimes have gone in opposite directions. For example, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI showed a 2.1% drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an increase of 29.3%.
But there is a more fundamental problem. The FBI and NCVS’s estimates of reported crimes have also gone in opposite directions since 2020. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crimes generally tended to move up and down together. But from 2020 to 2022, these two numbers were almost perfectly negatively related to each other. Each time one measure of reported violent crimes rose, the other measure fell.
For example, while the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6% and 29.3%, respectively.”
Dr. Lott sums it up here:
“The news media relies on reported crime numbers without considering unreported crime. However, the gap between the two measures of reported crimes provides strong doubts about the accuracy of the FBI’s reported crime data. Americans believe that crime is increasing as law enforcement is collapsing. They also say that they are reporting more crimes to the police, but that isn’t showing up in the FBI reports.”
How can we have good public policy without good data, while many cities and the FBI are clearly cooking the books? The answer is we cannot. It’s another reason why the Framers never wanted the government to have a monopoly on power and why they enshrined our God-given right to keep and bear arms into our Constitution.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Legal updates & IFC at NRAAM: This week’s President’s Message includes a couple of surprising court decisions and a heads-up that IFC will be attending the NRA Annual Meeting in Dallas this week. As President of Iowa Firearms Coalition, I was invited to speak at the Clubs & Associations Forum on Friday, May 17th. After missing the last two weeks for a much-needed vacation, I’m back at it here at IFC.
Legal Updates
These last few weeks have seen someinteresting court rulings from some surprising places.
Thisfirstunfortunately is from the Iowa Supreme Court with a ruling (I think incorrectly) that antique muzzleloading firearms are “firearms” when it comes to ‘felon in possession’ statutes. We strongly disagree with this ruling and are studying the case to see if the Iowa legislature needs to clarify this issue.
The more interesting case is that the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has held that non-violent convicted felons cannot be denied the right to keep and bear arms in Duarte. In Duarte, the three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that they could not be denied. The case was very well summarized by Jeff Charles at RedState:
“The court’s ruling repudiated an earlier Ninth Circuit decision in United States v. Vongxay and argued that the decision was “clearly irreconcilable” with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen. The Vongxay ruling upheld federal laws prohibiting felons from owning firearms.
The court applied Bruen’s two-step framework, acknowledging that Duarte, as an American citizen, is part of “the people” covered by the Second Amendment and rejected the state’s argument that felons are excluded from its constitutional protections.
At Bruen’s second step, the court determined that “The Government put forward no ‘well-established and representative historical analogue’ that ‘impose[d] a comparable burden on the right of armed self-defense’ that was ‘comparably justified’ to the current law’s “sweeping, no-exception, lifelong ban.”
Why This is Surprising
What is striking to me is that this same court just overruled its own prior decision in United States v. Vongxay. That case previously upheld the federal ban on felons’ possession of firearms. You might remember that the current SCOTUS session included a case I’ve previously written about, United States v. Rahimi, challenging that ban. That ruling has yet to be passed down from SCOTUS but is expected shortly.
At the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the only felonies defined by law were capital crimes like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and a few others. At that time, capital crimes were mostly punishable by death. Because those were so serious, persons convicted of them lost their constitutional rights.
This ruling might be the 9th Circuit’s attempt to set up a future Bruen-limiting SCOTUS ruling. For now, however, the Bruen decision is upending nearly everything related to gun bans and prohibitions. Its impact will be felt for years–and that is good news. I’ll follow up in the next few weeks in a future President’s Message, with the “in common use” standard. I think that standard may be the answer to nearly every unconstitutional gun ban starting with the 1934 National Firearms Act to the present.
Please post a comment below on this issue for us. We’d like to get your input on this important question.
National Rifle Association Annual Meeting 2024
NRAAM is this week, and a couple of members of our Executive Committee will be in attendance in Dallas. On Friday morning, May 17th, I have the honor of presenting about IFC’s social media efforts. I’ll be talking about how we successfully spread the truth regarding the Second Amendment far and wide. As the 2020 and 2022’s ‘NRA Outstanding State Association of the Year’, IFC continues to set the pace when it comes to leveraging both social and earned media.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Apples to apples, a comparison that we hear all the time from those dangerous quack gun control advocates. You know, the same people who tell us to “follow the science”, but who never do. A great example is that for over two hundred years New York City’s murder rate has been more than five times what London’s has been. In 1911, NYC passed the strictest gun control law in America. This was, thankfully, overturned by the Bruen decision over 100 years later. In this YouTube video, “Gun Control Zealots Hate Facts, This is Why…”, Dr. Thomas Sowell points out why it’simportant to look into the full history and not just make snapshot comparisons of different countries. As Dr. Sowell says; “Gun control zealots, they hate facts!” Sorta like President Biden when it comes to guns.
IFC 2024 IOWA LEGISLATIVE WRAP UP
One importantpiece of legislation that was passed and just signed by Governor Reynolds is the Students First Safety Act. Slightly amended from the original version that passed the Iowa House, it takes effect immediately.
In an op-ed out of The Tennessean, we find out that the same common sense eluding Iowa’s State Education Association leadership is also a problem in The Volunteer State. The author opines:
“Teachers like me are trained to educate kids. Arming us will make everyone less safe.”
It’s easy for any thinking person to take her arguments apart here:
“My lifelong passion for education has led me straight to Nashville, Tennessee, where I now major in elementary education at Vanderbilt.
Part of my studies requires me to complete countless hours of elementary education curricula, including tutoring, practicum, and student teaching, all to ensure I’m well trained for the many challenges of the job. Managing a classroom is taxing, it takes an incredible amount of focus and dedication for not only students but also teachers, to get through a single lesson.
And these difficulties are all without deadly weapons in the mix. Our attention should be on students, not firearms. Guns are already the leading cause of death for my generation – and my students’ generation – and this would only increase the risk for me and my students.”
Teachers overwhelmingly agree that guns do not belong in schools
More guns in more places do not make us safer, especially schools. The risk of a shooting increases when we bring guns into the classroom. There have already been several incidents of guns unintentionally or intentionally discharged on school grounds by school staff. Not only that but research also strongly suggests that children will access guns when they are present. There have been multiple situations where guns carried into schools were misplaced and several more where they were outright stolen by students.”
Interesting to me that Tennessee teachers don’t trust their fellow teachers with firearms, yet they expect us to trust these same teachers with our kids? Several of the author’s statements are flat-out lies.
Scholastic Clays is the safest sport in American schools and has been from its inception.
Never forget that Time and Math are irrefutable when it comes to stopping an armed attacker.
Watch this short Facebook video by IFC Board member Richard Rogers for a breakdown of our legislative victories in this session here. Richard will have more details on those victories shortly.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Serving IFC’s membership and for that matter all Iowan’s God-given right of self-defense, is what drives every one of our volunteers here at the Iowa Firearms Coalition. As your President, I’ve always strived to be a good steward of our volunteers’ time and our donors’ money. Our whole team here are volunteers, unlike other groups.
After several years of using the same vendor for our membership management system, that vendor has raised prices significantly, reduced the quality of the services they have provided to IFC, and suffered “lost files” issues. We made the decision last year to go with a different membership management system. The cost of the new system is less than one-fourth of what we were paying for the previous system.
That rolling “cutover” has not been without its growing pains. The most significant has been with the automatic renewal of annual memberships. You should be receiving emails reminding you to renew your membership in advance of it’s expiring, and if it has expired. However, due to the changeover, please don’t automatically assume your auto-renewal will handle that. You will need to go in and reset your password and manually renew this year. Your auto-renewal will restart after that. Also, if you could add membership@iowafc.org to your contacts list, that should prevent our emails from being directed to your spam box.
IOWA LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
There was a lot of progress made late last week in the Iowa Senate with that body passing several important IFC-supported bills. Some bills are on the way to Governor Reynolds for signature; others went back to the Iowa House for final reconciliation due to small amendments by the Senate. Hopefully, they will be acted on quickly by the Iowa House.
Update: Monday, April 15th, the House passed HF2586 with the Senate amendment, on a vote of 61-36. This is the hard-won Students First Safety Act, headed now to the Governor’s desk for signature!
HOGG SLAPDOWN: AKA “THE GUN CONTROL DEBATE IS OVER”
From our friends over at RedState, in an exchange from self-proclaimed firearms expert David Hogg and a Chinese immigrant who escaped communism:
LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Hi, my name is Lily Tang Williams. Welcome to my live free or die state. Actually, I am a Chinese immigrant who survived communism. And under Mao, you know, 40 million people were starving to death after he sold communism to them. And 20 million people died… murdered during his cultural revolution. So my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, that our government in the U.S., in D.C., will never become a tyrannical government? Can you guarantee that to me?
DAVID HOGG: There’s no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical. LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Well then the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns. And you should go to China. Never. Never. And you should go to China to see how gun control works for the dictatorship of the CCP.”
You can see the exchange on X by following this link.
Looks like the aforementioned anti-gun activist, David Hogg has turned his PAC into a fundraising machine for his personal benefit — like some ineffective, no-compromise, allegedly pro-2A groups.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Sign up now for our e-mail alert list to stay plugged into what's going on with your 2A rights here in Iowa.
IFC will never sell, rent or share your personal information, including your e-mail address, with any third parties for any purposes without your express permission. IFC may share your personal information for the purpose of delivering our e-mail to you or as required by law.
Recent Comments